Section 5 Entry 0001. Date: 2002 November 12 Tuesday.
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I'm revising my way through my short story stockpile, and I've got as far as the story "Fat Girls on Mars", which is (partly) about Mars. And I'm writing a scene between dad and Harold ... dad is sceptical of the value of astronauts in the space program, because:-

"Dad believed that the whole astronaut business had been a fraud from start to finish. Before the moon was ever visited by astronauts, a Russian robot landed there, collected samples and came home. That being the case, why bother sending along the unnecessary cargo of breathing meat?"

Key point: dad may well be wrong! Quite possibly the astronauts got to the moon before the Russian robot, in which case the story will have to be changed. (I haven't finished checking because I've quite simply been too flat-out busy.)

In any case, whether dad is right or wrong about the robot being first (at a guess, wrong) it is true that an unmanned Russian robot flew to the moon and returned to planet Earth bearing moon rocks. And remembering this really takes me back.

When I was a kid, there was a day when I read a little article in the newspaper - not much, just three or four paragraphs, and I don't even think it was on the front page - saying that a Russian spacecraft (an "unmanned" spacecraft, I believe it was termed, back in those days before the advance of political correctness) had landed on the moon and had returned to planet Earth with samples of rocks.

And I couldn't believe how small the news story was. And a week later, the newspaper having vanished into the trash by then, I wasn't sure if this had really happened at all, or whether it was maybe something that I just dreamt.

As a kid, I was a very thoroughgoing science fiction fan, so I was biased. However, right through my childhood, the space program had been big news, and that was what I couldn't understand, as a child: the discrepancy between the media coverage given to the actual astronauts (living, breathing, smiling, joking, risking their lives and being recovered from the sea after parachuting down to the ocean in their space capsules) and that given to the scientific achievement of the robot.

And this story, "Fat Girls on Mars", is, at least in part, a product of that childhood puzzlement.

As I write this, I'm on the train, a long way from my Internet connection, so I open up the copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that I have on my computer's hard drive (the 2001 edition, I think) and hunt for "Lunakod", which I think is the name of the Russian robot.

And here is the entry ... sort of ... the "Lunokod" turns out to have been a robot buggy which ran around the surface of the moon (I remember it now). The Russian robot spacecraft apparently belonged to the Luna series, and, yes, a couple of these brought back core samples from the moon to planet Earth, these core samples apparently being called ... well, I can't check, because Windows 98 has crashed (again) and, after rebooting, the encylopaedia refuses to open.

(I like to use my Windows 98 partition for my writing, since it has the encylopaedia, the very useful WordNet dictionary and my favorite word processor, UltraEdit-32. But Windows 98 crashes often enough to annoy me, and I find myself doing a lot of work on my Linux partition, particularly work on my website ....)

In any case, the encyclopaedia entry does not make it clear exactly when the Russians used their robot to recover samples from the moon. It seems to have been in the 1970s. However, even as an adult, I'm expecting to be able to open up the encylopaedia and find an exact date for this accomplishment, together with some kind of discussion of its technical significance.

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Section 5 Entry 0002. Date: 2002 November 14 Thursday.   (diary)    (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)


The shinkansen, the bullet train, late at night ... sliding through a landscape of lights ... no wilderness out there, but boxes of cold white lights, ribbons of orange lights curling away into the darkness ... red neon, blue neon, green neon ... something dreamlike about all this ... up on the second floor of a double-decker train ....

The ride so smooth that you really have no sense of speed, no sense of it at all ... the computer running so smoothly under Linux that it's like magical electronic paper rather than a cranky box of software ... only paper that sings to me, a small library of music available at the touch of a button ....

The first time I ever saw one of these double-decker trains, I was more than half-convinced that I was hallucinating. And if my childhood self could see my present mode of existence, the whole deal might seem like something out of a half-nightmarish hallucination ....

news early 2003: shinkansen driver falls asleep

The science fiction writer Heinlein once created a hero who was (not very imaginatively!) a writer, and who carried around his whole opus, everything he'd ever written, on a "computer chip". The other day, in the electronics district of Akihabara, I bought a compact flash memory card, a little thing not much larger than the face of my watch, and on this card, two hundred and fifty six megabytes of memory, I could comfortably store every single thing I've ever written.

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Section 3 Entry 0003. Date: 2002 November 15 Friday.   (diary)    (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)


Autumn in Japan has always meant two things, kaki and kerosene. Now, however, it means not two things but three.

According to the dictionary, the word "kaki" can mean "fire", "firearms", "oyster", "flower vase", "the flowering season", "a fence", "a hedge", "summer", "the summer period" and "the undermentioned". (In case you were wondering, Japanese is a great language when it comes to manufacturing puns.) The word "kaki" can also mean "persimmon".

Of these meanings, the one I want is "persimmon".

Before I came to Japan, "persimmon" was just a word. Now it is a very solid fruit of a startlingly dense orange which shades into red as the flesh becomes overripe. It is extremely juicy and the juice adheres to the fingers. It would be excessive to call the flesh glutinous, and yet certainly the kaki is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the nashi. The nashi is light, crisp and refreshing. The kaki is heavy, dense and filling.

In my neighborhood, one resident has a tree with branches laden with unharvested kaki. This is not an uncommon site. I don't know if the fruit will eventually be picked, or if they will finally drop and rot.

So much for kaki. As for kerosene, that is what is used to power the heaters which (typically) keep Japanese houses warm through the cold days of autumn and winter.

At times, Japan gives the impression of being an extremely high-tech society. Take the bath in the house where I live, for example (the bath which I have finally, after six months of ignoring it, learnt to control).

To control the bath, there is a master button you push to turn on the hot water. You can push another button to bump up the temperature, and the temperature jumps cunningly, in a single leap, from about 47 degrees centigrade right up to 60, leaping the land of extremely hot bathwater for the uninhabitable territory of hot water laundry in a single bound.

Another button specifies how many liters the bath is to hold when filled. If you put in the plug and leave the bath running, the water will switch itself off when the bath holds the specified amount of liquid.

When you are in the bath, there is a reheating button you can push, causing water to be sucked out of a hole at one end of the bath, recirculated through the heating system and then pumped back in again, freshly hot.

Additionally, if you find yourself starting to drown, there is an emergency button you can push. This, however, only sets off a weak whistling sound in the living room. If someone happens to be lying on the couch and happens to have a lifebelt handy, your life will be saved. Otherwise, you can expect to perish miserably.

Jump far enough into the future, and no doubt the bath will give you the options of calling for the police, ambulance services, the fire department or a lawyer, depending on what happens to be appropriate. But here, in the opening years of the Twenty First Century, all you can call for is help, and that call, as mentioned, goes no further than the living room.

So much for the bath (at least, assuming that we ignore, for the moment, the four-button box which controls the bathroom ventilation, offering the option of unmodified air, cool dry air, hot moist air or hot dry air, the last option very handy indeed if you have just inadvertently used a three-hour afternoon thunderstorm to give your futon a very thorough wash.)

Some things, then, seem fairly high tech. The bath, for instance. The broadband Internet connection. The big gray box which is both a microwave oven and a conventional electric oven, capable not just of nuking a pizza but also of doing traditional oven-type tasks like baking cakes or turning out baked potatos.

And yet there are other things which seem amazingly primitive, and one of these is this business of using kerosene heaters.

In my childhood, in New Zealand, our house was heated by burning wood in the grate of a traditional fireplace. Later, like most of the rest of the country, our family graduated to electric heaters. Consequently, to make heat by actually burning something in the house seems a bit primitive.

Still. Once you are used to it, it seems very reasonable.

Typically, kerosene is delivered around a neighborhood by a small truck which visits weekly, a loudspeaker announcing its arrival. When the truck arrives, you take out your kerosene can, which is made of plastic, and which holds eighteen liters of kerosene. These cans are commonly sold in hardware stores and the like.

Later, using a hand-squeezed pump, you fill your kerosene heater (or heaters, as the case may be) from the kerosene can. The pump, a very cheap and flimsy gadget, consists of a firm plastic tube which descends into the kerosene can, a plastic squeeze-bulb atop that firm tube, and a flexible tube which is used to feed the actual kerosene heater.

There are some kerosene heaters which just passively burn kerosene. However, a common arrangement is to have a kerosene heater which is plugged into an electrical outlet. A fan then blows the hot air from the heater through the room, allowing for fairly fast heating.

If you have an air conditioner, and most people do, then it is also possible to heat your quarters by using the air conditioner to heat air rather than cool it. However, running a kerosene heater is a lot more economical than running the air conditioner, and for most private homes the air conditioner is largely reserved for summer use. (In offices and hotels, however, in winter the air conditioner is often brought into play as a heating unit.)

Autumn, then, means kaki and kerosene. And the third thing that is conjured up by the word "autumn"? The third thing, the new thing, is Mount Fuji.

Previously, I lived in Hiyoshi, an area of Yokohama separated from any possible vista of Mount Fuji by a high ridge. Mount Fuji was a small thumbnail of a cone glimpsed, sometimes, from the railway line which runs from Kawasaki Station through Musashi Kosugi.

Now, however, in the cool clear days of autumn, the mountain is frequently visible from my living room. It is covered with snow, which makes it seem both bigger and closer. When bare of snow, it tends to blend into the intervening terrain of the mountain massif known as Tanazawa, a rugged chunk of wilderness in Yokohama's back yard. The snow makes Mount Fuji's classical volcanic cone stand out, occasionally with stunning effect, as when the sunset turns the entire sky red, and the snow itself becomes pink-red, so the mountain seems internally illuminated, dreamlike, floating.

If you ignore the wires, the marching high tension wires, the black and gray blocks of high rise buildings, the conical gray transformers clinging to the heights of utility poles, the gray railroads elevated above the rivers, the gray railroads elevated above the streets, the huge hulking gray motorway elevated above the classical elegance of Nihonbashi bridge ... if you are really good at ignoring things, you can catch, now and then, a five-second glimpse of Hokusai's Japan, and maybe even live in it for two and a half of those seconds.

But my Japan is not really Mount Fuji pink in the sunset. It is WiFi manuals in Japanese, Microsoft error messages in Japanese, Linux magazines in Japanese, the Roman alphabet skipping into Chinese characters on my computer screen, and the illuminated schematics of the shinkansen decrypted and interpeted (cars one to four, this time, have free seating, and, of these, cars one and two are the non-smoking cars).

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